Month: July 2014

Durham, N.C. has been good to Curtis Eller. Ever since the reigning banjo king of the East Coast’s “Antique-Garde” relocated to North Carolina from New York City a few years ago, his fan base has grown more fanatical at shows and on Facebook, and his sound has ripened like delicious fruit or aged like sweet…

There are certainties in this universe and, to cop a phrase from that shaman Donald Rumsfeld, known knowns. Time will accumulate in seconds and minutes and hours. People will be born and people will die. Empires will be built and nations will fall. And The Melvins will release a record every few months and it will…

It’s hard to write about Nonagon, a Chicago-rooted band whose latest pocket full of cuts and volts is a 12-inch EP titled The Last Hydronaut, without using words like blistering or conjuring up images of what a caged animal sounds like after it’s been poked and prodded, jabbed and jabbered at, then let loose. For…

“Ampersand” showed such promise. But we can’t all be Ian Williams. Mylets, the one-man-band pseudonym of guitar-texturist Henry Kohen, aspires to attain the heights of Williams’ pedal-frenzied, signature-shifting genius with groups like Don Caballero and Battles. But Mylets’ debut, Retcon, falls short, plain and simple. Back to “Ampersand,” though. Earlier this year, Kohen’s label, Sargeant…